Fort de Cavagnial
Kansas
Long before there was a Kansas, there was a French fort near here. Fort de Cavagnial was the first permanent European settlement within the borders of present day Kansas, built in seventeen forty four. The French named it for a colonial governor of Louisiana.
It sat above the Missouri River as a fur trading post, where French traders and soldiers did business with the Kansa and other tribes of the western plains. Inside the log stockade stood a commandant's house, a guardhouse, a powder house, and quarters for traders. At its busiest perhaps fifty people lived here.
France held it for twenty years, until the wider Louisiana country passed to Spain, and the fort was abandoned around seventeen sixty four. Decades later, when Lewis and Clark came up the Missouri, they noted the ruins of the old French post still visible along the bluffs.
